Waking on my side of the bed, I place my hand on the smooth expanse of white where once your shock of white hair was arrayed, a sea for the yacht of my mouth to sail upon.

Remember what I said when we were young, and my fingers now touching you in black & white were less like these crooked twigs? We were in that room by the sea, and I was hiding in your black hair, a rain cloud spread across a clear blue day. I said I wouldn't be able to know the world without the clarity of openings that is your body coming into lamplight at dusk.

Now the world is all white. Ski and moose tracks bead the snowfields. And I wander in these woods remembering how this morning in the greenhouse, I saw, again, your curled fingers enter into the whorl of orchids to taste their colors: chartreuse, mauve, crimson, and finally ivory as translucent as your hair.

Note: This poem came to me, in light of a wonderful movie, "Away from Her" I saw last night, in this period of time I am spending waiting for a flight to Chicago from Jacksonville. It also, in some sense, ties in with this other poem I wrote a while ago.

I walk on in the snow. I’ve closed My eyes, but the light knows how to breach My porous lids. And I perceive That in my words it’s still the snow That eddies, thickens, shears apart.

Snow, Letter we find again and unfold: And the ink has paled and the bleached-out marks Betray an awkwardness of mind Which makes their lucid shadows just a muddle.

And we try to read, we can’t retrieve from memory Who’s taking such an interest in ourselves—unless It’s summer again; unless we see the leaves Behind the snowflakes, and the heat Rising from the absent ground like mist.

Translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers